Freely Expandable Single Crystalline Si Networks for MEMS Applications

概要

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Recently, a new flexible structure made of a single-crystal silicon substrate has been reported from a Stanford group. The structure consists of many isolated islands and extremely thin silicon springs connecting those silicon islands. Their technique seems very innovative since single crystalline silicon has been regarded to be solid and never flexible. In this paper, it will be reported that a different flexible structure with a 6-fold rotational symmetry was designed. The flexibly deforming single-crystal silicon network consisting of silicon islands, each of which has three spiral springs, has been successfully fabricated. The structure was expanded to wrap a hemisphere with the diameter 10 mm. The 120 silicon islands, which were contained in the silicon network, were nearly uniformly distributed on the hemisphere. This technique may be useful if there are needs to uniformly distribute small silicon devices on a structure such as a fingertip.
2010-04-01